Home Again with Thomas Wolfe

On Monday night, a bitter wind swept up the streets that run perpendicular to the water in Brooklyn Heights, but it was warm and peaceful in the soft light that filled the elegant double parlor of a restored brownstone at 5 Montague Terrace*, where for two years in the nineteen-thirties Thomas Wolfe kept an apartment on the fourth floor. There, he hid from the sudden fame that accompanied the publication of his first novel, “Look Homeward, Angel,” while completing his second, “Of Time and the River.” It was said also that Wolfe picked a neighborhood safely across the East River from Manhattan to stay clear of an angry, jilted husband, with whose wife, Aline Bernstein, he was conducting a passionate but tortured, and eventually doomed, affair.

More than seventy years after Wolfe left town, we had assembled at his former residence for “An Evening at Mr. Wolfe’s,” a selection of readings from his Brooklyn period performed by the actors Chris Eigeman and Susan Bruce, and hosted by the Brooklyn Heights Association. With a nod to the weather, Neil Calet, vice president of the association’s board of directors, began the evening by reading from a letter Wolfe had written to his mother in 1934, in which he notes that his new overcoat is no match for a temperature of three degrees below zero on the Heights, with “the wind going through you like a knife.” True then, presumably, and certainly true on Monday night. We shivered for an instant in agreement, remembering where we’d just been and what awaited us when we were to leave.

Eigeman then took over as emcee, leading a discursive retelling of Wolfe’s life. After a bit of biography, he paused to make a clarification. This is a different Tom Wolfe, he told the audience, in case we had expected talk of white suits and Kool-Aid. “We’ll wait if you have to get your coat and leave.” We remained.

Wolfe, that incandescent exploding star of early-twentieth-century fiction, had a deeply felt ambivalence to the idea of home. As an adult, he lived in physical and psychic exile from Asheville, North Carolina, where he grew up, and his writing is both obsessed with the particularities of that past and an aggressive act of rejection. Similarly, Wolfe was alternatively exultant and disparaging of his adopted borough: “God, I hate Brooklyn,” he once told a New York newspaperman. “I’ve seen the damnedest things here … it’s a great enormous blot and three million people live here!”

Eigeman noted, though, that despite Wolfe’s moments of distaste, Brooklyn was also the site of some of his greatest writing, prose that often features “elegiac suites that turn on a dime and punch you in the face.” It was thrilling and daunting to think of him, perched up a few flights of stairs, writing these lines (which Susan Bruce read on Monday) about the night he met Bernstein while on a transatlantic voyage:

He turned, and saw her then, and so finding her, was lost, and so losing self, was found, and so seeing her, saw for a fading moment only the pleasant image of the woman that perhaps she was, and that life saw. He never knew: he only knew that from that moment his spirit was impaled upon the knife of love.

The penultimate highlight of the night came with Bruce’s soaring reading from the opening of “An End and a Beginning,” the third part of the posthumously published novel “You Can’t Go Home Again.” There, Wolfe spools out a masterful extended metaphor: that the country crashing into and emerging out of the Depression is like a cicada, which as it enters “the last stage of its life cycle,” goes through a magnificent transformation, becoming a winged creature and “leaving behind the brown and lifeless husk from which it came.” The country’s leaders wanted to cling to the past, Wolfe writes:

But they were wrong. They did not know that you can’t go home again. America had come to the end of something, and to the beginning of something else. But no one knew what that something else would be, and out of the change and the uncertainty and the wrongness of the leaders grew fear and desperation, and before long hunger stalked the streets. Through it all there was only one certainty, though no one saw it yet. America was still America, and whatever new thing came of it would be American.

And then the evening’s ultimate highlight: a mystery guest, everybody’s favorite parlor trick. It was Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, sporting a knit winter hat with the name of his city stitched on the front. He gamely read from Wolfe’s Brooklynese-dialect-mad short story, “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” (published in the June 15, 1935, issue of The New Yorker). When he reached the end of the piece, with its place names rendered “Bensonhoist,” “East Noo Yawk,” “duh Heights,” etc., Markowitz told the audience, “My accent’s not far from that, I hate to tell you.” He then told a great story that can’t be done justice here, about a recent incident, when a group of schoolchildren visiting Borough Hall mistook his wife for a parrot.

That was it, a fine performance, and then, homeward.

Photograph: Julienne Schaer.

*An earlier version of this post misreported the address as 5 Montague Street.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.

Recommended Stories

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.